Parsing the New Plant Panoply

Some are yellow, some are purple. But it was the bright orange flowers that grabbed the attention of my friend Margaret Roach as we paged through a pile of 2012 plant catalogs one recent day.

"I love orange," Margaret said as she eyed a variety of echinacea, a.k.a. coneflower, called 'Hot Summer.' It was an unexpected comment from a longtime garden author and blogger known for her avoidance of anything garish.

But orange is the color of the trim on Margaret's dark olive-green farmhouse in upstate New York near where I live. That's why she seeks out that color of flower to plant in containers outside her home.

Orange blooms weren't the only thing on our minds as we plowed through this year's offerings. Every year the garden industry tries to wow homeowners with shiny new plants. And as with new car models, some become classics while others turn out to be lemons.

"I get nervous I'm going to get another weakling," said Margaret, who for many years was Martha Stewart's top editor. She recounted an orange petunia she tried last year—an unusual color for that front-stoop favorite—that pooped out at her house.

That's the trouble with dabbling in new plants. You're gambling whether they will thrive in your yard. Though plant purveyors claim they test new offerings for several years before putting them on the market, their research sometimes falls short.

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Klehm's unusual gold-leaf peony
www.songsparrow.com

But Margaret felt good about the orange echinacea, introduced to the garden world in the past year or so, because we found it in the Klehm's Song Sparrow catalog, a longtime seller of dependable plants. (It's also available from other retailers, as are some other plants described here.) "I'm going to dabble again," she said.

Elsewhere in Klehm's a yellow plant caught my eye, but it wasn't a yellow flower. Instead, it's a peony whose leaves are yellow, something neither of us had seen before. Peonies are reliable garden plants—some live for decades—but their downside is they put out those enormous, silky, often-fragrant blooms for just a few weeks in late spring. Then you're left with nothing but mounds of knee-high green leaves to look at for the next four or five months.

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Baptisia Decadence 'Lemon Meringue'
Walters Gardens Inc.

But a peony with yellow leaves—this one is called "Golden Angel"—would be a whole new ballgame. I could see how it would be a standout in my yard. Only one thing gave us pause: the $125 price, an incredible premium to risk on a new plant considering peonies usually sell for $20 to $30.

Next we turned to Plant Delights, as well known among serious gardeners for its unusual plants as for its cheeky catalog covers drawn like cartoons. (This year's cover is a horticultural takeoff on the Occupy Wall Street movement and the presidential race.)

Inside the Plant Delights catalog we spotted another orange echinacea, this one called 'Tangerine Dream.' The coneflower, like the one from Klehm, was more evidence of a trend we'd been detecting in the 2012 offerings: a predilection for native plants. Growing plants native to the U.S., rather than ones originally from elsewhere, has become increasingly popular in some quarters. It's also movement I'm a bit skeptical about.

We saw more signs of the nativist trend in the White Flower Farm catalog, which is selling a new variety of baptisia, the third garden company we found promoting this American plant. This one is called Baptisia Decadence 'Lemon Meringue.' ("What is it with giving plants food names?" I asked Margaret.) It features bright yellow flowers —unusual for baptisia, which most commonly has blue blooms—on equally unusual charcoal-colored stems instead of green ones.

"I can get why people are breeding baptisia," Margaret said. "People want a refined native, a native plant that went to charm school."

The 135-year-old Burpee catalog, meantime, is offering another interesting yellow plant, what it says is the first geranium with true yellow blooms. (Some others that claimed to be yellow are more of a cream color.)

Geraniums of this sort, properly called pelargoniums, are those spiky-flower staples found in planters outside supermarkets and on patios across the country. They are common because they are dependable bloomers, but until now they have been offered mostly in shades of pink, red, purple and white.

The new plant, appropriately named Geranium 'First Yellow,' brings a subtle-yellow alternative to these sometimes lurid flowers. But I see one potential downside: The flower heads look skimpy, as least in the photos on the Burpee website.

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A new agapanthus variety called 'Storm Cloud.'
Wayside Gardens

While Margaret seeks out orange flowers I'm a sucker for blue ones. The Wayside Gardens catalog is promoting a new agapanthus variety, called 'Storm Cloud,' that it claims has the deepest blue blooms ever seen on this genus. I'm tempted to try the plant, whose ancestors originated in South Africa, even though I'll have to move it indoors over the winter in a pot since it isn't cold-hardy in my growing zone.

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